prince

......aaaaand they're gone

got to see 5 of them, haha. oh well. hopefully someone capped 'em while they were up

Damn, I only got to watch "When Doves Cry". I hope these can make their way onto Dailymotion or something.

new song to debut friday on The Current radio:

http://www.startribune.com/blogs/85053272.html?elr=KArksLckD8EQDUoaEyqyP4O:DW3ckUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aULPQL7PQLanchO7DiUss

.....and it's awful:

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/radio/services/the_current/features/2010/02/prince-cause-and-effect/index.shtml

man he has so completely and totally lost it.

bad wrong false prince

wow yeah that is bad

WTF is Prince using MS Songsmith now?

i want to say "nothing can ever erase the work he did in the 80s" but i somehow wonder if this song is actually capable of erasing the master tape to "if i was your girlfriend"

With the amount of stuff going on in the background it sounds like he recorded over the top of something. In case anyone is wondering what the reverse bit at ~3:30 is, it's Prince saying "contracts just make you smaller".

the problem with all of prince's stuff from the 90s on is that i think he fundamentally misunderstands what made him great at one time.

he's a great minimalist that thinks he's a maximalist.

eh he's done some good minimalist stuff since the 90s - Black Sweat, for ex.

but yeah I agree that in general he's better when he's doing less

Am I crazy or has Prince benn listening to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch#v=CXCiS2FpmIc&feature=related

eh he's done some good minimalist stuff since the 90s - Black Sweat, for ex.

― dead clown handjob (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, February 26, 2010 5:44 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

black sweat....and....black sweat...and..um...black sweat ; )

j.k. but yeah that's the only song i've heard in years i thought was GOOD good not just "hey this is pretty good for prince now, i guess"

i can't listen to this at work but it's probably for the best.

it's funny, i just listened to mplsound again and thought it wasn't that bad (if you have no expectations except for dad-prince).

oh what the fuck

like I could put up with the verse and I could put up with the chorus, but not both together in the same song; that is exactly the wrong thing to do, dude

i should do a poll, this song versus his vikings playoff song, which sounded like the work of a slightly deranged lutheran church choir director

at least the Vikings playoff song was awesome in its insanity; this is boring, mild-mannered shit that thinks it's shit-hot

replace lutheran w/ witness and you just about summarized prince 2010

j.k. but yeah that's the only song i've heard in years i thought was GOOD good not just "hey this is pretty good for prince now, i guess"

title tracks of musicology and 3121 were pretty good and stripped down imho. there was some other track on musicology that I liked but I'm blanking on it at the moment... but yeah his hit-to-miss ratio is pretty sad.

its weird how humorless his recorded output has become. dude was funny as hell when I saw him um... 10 years ago

I mean, when even the people who defended The Rainbow Children are like "yo this is hot trash" it's time to reconsider your artistic vision

Hey, I really like The Rainbow Children!

I do, too! This is bullshit tho

Prince has been churning out the doo doo for a good long time now. Last thing I really liked by him was that "P=Funk" track. He's creatively bankrupt IMHO.

How Prince managed to lose it this badly makes a pretty great case for contracts, editorial guidance, et al.

I mean - he's always crammed as much as he could get away with into his songs and it usually worked. Probably because they were songs. Stuff like this new track just makes my eyes glaze over.

uh, this is a song, it's just not a very good one

I mean - he's always crammed as much as he could get away with into his songs and it usually worked. Probably because they were songs. Stuff like this new track just makes my eyes glaze over.

― François de Roobabe (Capitaine Jay Vee), Friday, February 26, 2010 6:41 PM (27 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i disagree what is "crammed in" to, say "Kiss" or "When Doves Cry"?

both those songs are prince at his best....a peculiar, brittle minimal digital funk.

The problem with that statement is that Prince at his best is not only "Kiss", "Alphabet St", "Housequake" and "When Doves Cry"; it's also "1999", "I Wanna Be Ur Lover", "Mountains" and "Gett Off".

i think we may have different tastes in prince....

still i don't see those songs as being particularly busy or overstuffed like recent stuff

(though full disclosure: last album i heard was the one my wife got free when she went to a concert...it seemed just "fine" in the same way i guess like a new mark knophler solo album would seem to a dire straits fan)

OK, I'm 36 seconds in and it's already been like 10 different songs, WTF? So the intro stuff, and then when the big power chords and organ and I'm like, "Is he doing, like, a Boston album?" Then the other guitar groove kicks in and I'm thinking, "OK, ok, this could be like an updated version of 'Dirty Mind'-era shit," but then it started sucking. Does it get better? Do I click "Play" again?

answers to your last questions are "no" and "no"

Too late.

This is why we can't have nice things.

Oh, god, the guitar solo. That is the worst guitar tone I've ever heard on a Prince song. AND NOW ACOUSTIC GUITAR OH JESUS MAKE IT STOP.

Thank you, Prince, for pooping in my ears today. It made me appreciate good music even more.

just for reference, here's prince's vikings song

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/21/prince-vikings-song-audio_n_432433.html

at least with that, I had a desire to play it 7 times in a row (largely because I couldn't believe wtf it was I was hearing)

i disagree what is "crammed in" to, say "Kiss" or "When Doves Cry"?

but the extended version of "kiss" is just as wacky and overstuffed as nu-prince. "when doves cry" has gospel vocals, neo-classical keyboard breaks, guitar solos, etc, but it's a great song and all that stuff elevates it even more.

ok y'all i give...i guess i just thought saying lots of classic prince jams were minimal was like ac/dc has loud guitars but i retract my statement (also i'm not the hugest prince fan to begin with)

Prince used to be able to make minimal maximal.

and maximal minimal?

I don't know what's sadder, the fact that this song exists or the fact that lots of people on the "Tell us what you think" link are praising it.

Prince's diehard fans are pretty diehard.

if I could hack that link and replace it with a copy of T-99's "Anesthesia", I would

I guess I'm a pretty diehard fan - I will even tell you a couple of things on "Planet Earth" are worth your time - but even I couldn't defend this. Or that Vikings tune.

this new song sounds like hes just recording for recordings sake even more than usual, but i kinda like it just to see how bad hes really gotten. i wish he would stop doing these 'message' type songs where he thinks hes making some really important point. the structure is sort of like two 3 chains of golds packed into one.

Looking over this set, I may probably hold off as well. I like the album, but it's not one of my favorite Prince albums - he had yet to successfully integrate rap elements into his music (I don't think that really happened until The Gold Experience, partly because Tony M was gone by then and Prince handled it himself). The original CD was already mastered fine, that was the primary format, and non-album stuff that's been out there already like the single edits and remixes never really interested me. The three discs of vault items are interesting, I'll check those out, and the live material may be great, but it's possible I'll just be fine with the album I already have.

Apparently eight tracks from a preliminary version of that D&P set (and ultimately removed from the final track list) has leaked. Have not heard them myself but supposedly some good stuff in there.

i found an up of lauriann on YT, i won't bother linking because it'll probably be down by the time i finish posting, it's fucking _great_ tho

I’m going to be aggravated if this turns out to be good and I buy a damn Diamonds and Pearls box set.

If this further fucks up and delays their Super Deluxe reissues, I'm going to be really pissed.

https://www.billboard.com/business/legal/prince-estate-lawsuit-heirs-attempting-seize-control-1235580400/

have his films been polled?

ran across the lyrics from New World off Emancipation, both anti-trans and anti-vax

https://genius.com/Prince-new-world-lyrics

Ahead of the curve, as always.

But srsly folks, was there anyone in the 80s up to and maybe including Boy George who blurred the lines between every boy and every girl than prince? Physician, heel thyself.

As much as I love Prince, he's always been a wildly uneven political commentator, moreso after he became a Jehovah's Witness (which happened not long after Emancipation). His discography has tons of dubious lyrics and plenty of critics flagged them in their original reviews. It's a credit to his tremendous gifts that the musical elements of his work was usually more than enough to overshadow his lyrical deficiencies.

i can see how you could project an anti-trans reading on that but it seems like a stretch. how do we know that's what he meant?

he was a jehovah's witness for one

i'm sure he had some fucked up views, i just don't get that from the lyrics in this song

well obv i get the anti-vax thing from these lyrics. but which part is anti-trans?

As bird stated earlier, the song was recorded well before he became a JW. Likely around 1994. He converted around 2001. Also it stole its premise from Brave New World and likely didn't reflect any strong opinion of his own. Were anti-vax or anti-trans positions even on his radar at that time? Probably not.

or he's always been much more conservative than we thought

i don't know, a guy like prince, all you can is "it's complicated"

he wasn't always a JW, but he always loved god, he was always a Christian, and in those days, everything he learned about God was that God hated queerness. and something in him loved queerness, loved lesbians especially. "vagina was half boy and half girl/best of both worlds"... i mean, that's a gross way of looking at lesbians, but there's a _fascination_ there, at least. his closest collaborators were wendy and lisa, the work he did with them was the best of his career, and then he fired them for, well, being lesbian, mostly. he loved women, loved being around women, and he abused women. abused everyone around him, but especially women. he sings about wanting to be alone, and at the same time he kind of hated being alone. he sings about not taking pills and he took them, took them to deal with chronic pain, pain that stemmed in large part from his spending all those years walking around in high heels, and they killed him.

life gets complicated. sometimes. i mean, you look at little richard... with prince it was always a two-step, prince was never openly _queer_, he just had a, uh, sexuality. but little richard, him and queerness and god... it was complicated. little richard hated himself, and that's really sad to me. he shouldn't have had to go through all of that. it doesn't excuse anything. it's just what happened.

that's an even-handed and generous reading of prince imo.

i've cooled on him since his death tbqf

yah great post Kate

Excellent post Kate.

Also, just in case it wasn't known, Prince was raised as a Seventh-day Adventist, so he was probably surrounded by very social conservative brands of Christianity his entire life. And IIRC the Star-Tribune published an epic oral history after Prince's death where Wendy Melvoin mentioned that during one attempt at reconciliation (well after Prince had converted to JW), he asked her to renounce her sexuality and convert as well - pretty bad, but it's probably something I would've predicted given what was publicly known about his faith. It was a bittersweet remembrance though - Wendy knew the path he had taken and what it meant in terms of their friendship, that things would remain a mess, but she forgave him.

Thanks to Kate and bird for the nuances

https://polishedsolid.substack.com/p/my-2023-prince-year-in-review

The person who does this Substack just had a Prince conference this weekend in NY and am seeing lots of folks speaking highly of it online